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Thursday, 16 February 2017

The Power of Voice

The ability to convey one’s thoughts with the help
of voice is an underrated superpower that we humans possess. We can only imagine
the everyday struggles of someone who is not bestowed upon with such a gift. But,
apart from this, recent studies have discovered that our voice can be handy in
assessing the physiological state of our body, i.e. our voice can also reveal
if we’re getting ill.

A US based start-up called ‘Canary Speech’ is developing a way of analysing conversations
using machine learning to test for a number of neurological and cognitive
diseases, ranging from Parkinson’s disease to Dementia.

The idea for this start-up was born out of an
unfortunate personal experience for the firm’s co-founder Henry O’Connell, whose
friend was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease four years after it actually
happened.

Apparently, it is believed that vocal symptoms develop
way before other observable symptoms, which include changes to what people
say and how they say it.

Canary Speech developed algorithms after examining
various patients suffering from different conditions, which helps them to find
out the peculiarities in the kinds of words used, their phrasing and the
overall quality of speech.

The software is capable of picking up small changes
in one’s speech patterns, like softening of voice, repeated use of certain words
etc. that can be easily overlooked or ignored by those who live with us.

The goal is to diagnose a disease as soon as
possible, which gives more time to plan and work on the cure. The firm believes
that the outcome and accuracy of the algorithms will improve as it gains access
to more data related to various diseases.